UMass Dartmouth will help nonprofit arts and culture groups with marketing strategies as part of creative industry

Tuesday

Jul 8, 2014 at 5:47 PMJul 8, 2014 at 5:52 PM

Michael Holtzman Herald News Staff Reporter @MDHoltzman

DARTMOUTH — Business and arts faculty at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth see a creative industry emerging throughout the SouthCoast.

UMass Dartmouth can play a role in helping promote that industry, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot.

So starting this fall, faculty and students will help local nonprofit groups engaged in arts and culture create marketing strategies to promote events that won’t break what are often already shoestring budgets.

“Fall River and New Bedford have such great arts events. They could be a destination such as Providence is, with some of the events they create,” said Melissa Pacheco, a senior program specialist at UMass Dartmouth’s Charlton College of Business.

“So the question is, how do we get the word out?” she said.

Faculty from the College of Visual and Performing Arts will collaborate with Charlton College of Business faculty on answering that question, through $40,000 in grant funding from UMass President Robert Caret’s Creative Economy Initiatives Fund.

UMass Dartmouth faculty and students will be tasked with creating marketing tool kits for five to 10 local nonprofit groups.

Pacheco said those groups, including museums, art galleries and live performance spaces, “provide such excellent programing to the region."

"They are valuable, but are running on low budgets," Pacheco said. "The marketing piece tends to be a difficult piece.”

So, via the grant, UMass Dartmouth marketing students will get to help those groups develop what Pacheco called “out-of-the-box marketing initiatives,” including attention-grabbing guerilla marketing, flash mob marketing and social media strategies.

“We will do research to see which ones actually reached out, to identify what marketing programs actually work,” Pacheco said. “It’s not only to benefit our community, it’s for our students to utilize skills they’ve obtained at the university."

One of the keys is the marketing strategies must be low-cost, Pacheco said.

“We have to be thoughtful. What can we do with that type of funding? We don’t want to create a marketing promotion that is out of reach,” Pacheco said.

College of Visual and Performing Arts Assistant Dean Heather Bentz agreed that artists and the organizations that support them have limited funds. But they are creative. She said the collaboration proposed between Charlton and CVPA is in its “infancy stages.”

“We’re good at the making part,” Bentz said.

In just a few short years, the impact of collaborations between artists, local government and the business community is already being felt in New Bedford, and just starting to show in Fall River, Bentz said.

“New Bedford has grown tremendously along waterfront,” Bentz said. “I think it takes a lot of effort to really make change happen.”

Charlton College of Business Dean Angappa Gunasekaran said the goal is supporting “the economic growth of the SouthCoast,” by helping those in the nonprofit sector learn marketing, management and business plans.

Pacheco said the creative economy can help the SouthCoast grow in other areas as well.

“The creative economy employs so many people,” Pacheco said. “It has the potential to do so much for our industry, as people come to the city, and they attend those events, they go out and contribute to economy in general.

“They go out to eat, any type of tourism. It gives the city itself a different viewpoint, establishes it as an exciting place to be,” Pacheco said.

The Creative Economies Initiatives Fund was created in 2007 and has so far distributed more than $2 million for 73 different projects around the state. This year it will distribute a total of $270,000 this fall to eight projects by UMass faculty members across UMass’s five campuses, according to a press release.

Other new initiatives will include supporting a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community archives and education center in Northampton. Another is a collaboration with the Peace Institute in Dorchester to assist victims of violence.

Previous projects include the preservation of civil rights activist W.E.B Du Bois’s boyhood home in Great Barrington and the creation of a Jack Kerouac education and tourism site in Lowell. Last year, UMass Dartmouth students worked with B.M.C. Durfee High School students to photograph Fall River’s neighborhoods. The series was displayed at the Narrows Center for the Arts.